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Saturday, October 31, 2015

Consider the accident of an epidemic, which ancient Greek culture called miasma. Miasma is the second human-made hyperobject—the first was agrilogistic space as such, but miasma was the first hyperobject we noticed. You consider yourself settled and stable, although it would be better to describe your world as metastable: the components (humans, cows, cats, wheat) keep changing, but the city and the walls and the fields persist. You can observe miasmic phenomena haunting the edges of your temporal tunnel vision. You see them as accidental and you try to get rid of them. For instance, you move to America and start washing your hands to eliminate germs. Then you suffer from an epidemic of polio from which you had been protected until you started to police the temporal tunnel boundaries even tighter. This is the sub- ject of Philip Roth’s novel Nemesis and a good example of a strange loop. The global reach of agrilogistics is such that antibiotic-resistant bacteria may now be found throughout the biosphere: “in environmen- tal isolates, soil DNA . . . secluded caves . . . and permafrost,” in “arc- tic snow” and the open ocean. When you think it at an appropriate ecological and geological timescale, agrilogistics actually works against itself, defying the Law of Noncontradiction in spite of axiom (1).

If you've been reading this for a bit you'll know that I've had my issues with Žižek over the whole Buddhist unpleasantness.

But Slavoj, whom I invited to CU Boulder in 2000, shares a lot more with me than he doesn't.

For instance, I bet that in every situation involving thought that he finds himself in, Slavoj occupies (usually deliberately, like me) the position of the devil. We are disruptors who like to lob grenades and walk away while people rush around yelling.

Ecology without Nature was written from an explicitly Žižekian sort of a space, not necessarily in terms of the precise ideas, but definitely in terms of the stance. Which is definitely why Slavoj really liked it. He went around the world in 2007 to 2009 pretty much saying “ecology without nature” all the time, cause I'd sent him a copy.

That book was definitely a devil sort of a move. I literally got stalked and physically threatened for writing that one. Seriously...

Even my defense of Buddhism against Žižek is Žižekian. I'm saying in Nothing that if you're really going to champion Buddhism, you're going to want to embrace the dreaded New Age crystal loving, navel gazing “narcissism.”

So I'm writing this book about humans and it's saying all kinds of naughty things, like we are humans, we are the human species and all that. I'm writing it with a view to finding out whether we can expand communist theory (theories, really) to include nonhuman beings. Answer: yes! For a while I was thinking no, but I figured out how to say yes this year and I'm really happy about it.

Of course you have to make a few teensy weensy concessions :) Or communist theory can just fade quietly away... take your pick :)

So Slavoj, it's time for us to do some gigs together, no? I promise I won't be like Judith Butler. I call things by their names. They just aren't your granddaddy's things...

Friday, October 30, 2015

I just got the proofs! Proofs are cool, because you realize that you didn't screw up that badly. There's something about copy editing that makes me panic. But proof reading is sort of mellow. It's like your grave has already been dug, you know you are about to be executed, so a kind of calm reigns.

Anyway. Here's something naughty about Bruno Latour:

“Latour’s suggestion that we call [the Anthropocene] the Capitalocene misses the mark. Capital and capitalism are symptoms of the problem, not its direct causes. If the cause were capitalism, then Soviet and Chinese carbon emissions would have added nothing to global warming. Even the champion of distributed agency balks at calling a distributed spade a distributed spade.”

Yes. We are doing another gig! It will be at the documentary film festival that Olafur is curating with Naomi Klein, whom I'm so keen to meet. It will be on November 10, in the evening, 7pm I think. But I'm not sure exactly where.

“Meet Olafur Eliasson in a conversation with one of modern philosophy's most interesting minds, Timothy Morton. As a philosopher, Morton is an exponent of object-oriented ontology and has among other things earned much attention for his book 'Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the end of the World' (2013). He is central to the post-humanistic eco-criticism and has, on the more personal end of the spectrum, among other things published a private correspondence with Icelandic Björk. Eliasson and Morton have many overlapping interests, including the question of man's evolving relationship to nature and, in a wider perspective, the role of art in such a society. Meet the two men for a special night, where everything – or at least a lot – can happen, but above all for a night with two people in free associative fall through everything from planet scale death drive via deep ecology to anthropocentric copyright control.”

My next named lecture here in the US of A will be at the College of William and Mary, where the organizer wants me to say nice things about OOO. Which I'm always happy to do.

My talk is called “X-Existence,” and it's to do with road testing my new book project.

I love road testing my stuff. It makes it what it is, because the lecture theater is your lab if you do philosophy. Thinking is physical (pacing up and down and gesticulating) and interactive (q&a is the best, as are interviews, and dialogues--hi Olafur!).

My opener will be that to understand OOO we need to add Double X, hahaha. I shan't be explaining it here :)

Thursday, October 22, 2015

The Moral Theology of the Devil
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
(New York: New Directions, 1972), 90–7

The devil has a whole system of theology and philosophy, which will explain, to anyone who will listen, that created things are evil, that men are evil, that God created evil and that He directly wills that men should suffer evil. According to the devil, God rejoices in the suffering of men and, in fact, the whole universe is full of misery because God has willed and planned it that way.
Indeed, says this system of theology, God that Father took real pleasure in delivering His Son to His murderers, and God the Son came to earth because He wanted to be punished by the Father. Both of them together seek nothing more than to punish and persecute their faithful ones. As a matter of fact, in creating the world God had clearly in mind that man would inevitably sin and it was almost as if the world were created in order that man might sin, so that God would have an opportunity to manifest His justice.
So, according to the devil, the first thing created was really hell—as if everything else were, in some sense, for the sake of hell. Therefore the devotional life of those who are “faithful” to this kind of theology consists above all in an obsession with evil. As if there were not already enough evils in the world, they multiply prohibitions and make new rules, binding everything with thorns, so that man may not escape evil and punishment. For they would have him bleed from morning to night, though even with so much blood there is no remission of sin! The Cross, then, is no longer a sign of mercy (for mercy has no place in such a theology), it is the sign that Law and Justice have utterly triumphed, as if Christ had said: “I came not to destroy the Law but to be destroyed by it.” For this, according to the devil, is the only way in which the Law could really and truly be “fulfilled.” Not love but punishment is the fulfillment of the Law. The Law must devour everything, even God. Such is this theology of punishment, hatred and revenge. He who would live by such a dogma must rejoice in punishment. He may, indeed, successfully evade punishment himself by “playing ball” with the Law and the Lawgiver. But he must take good care that others do not avoid suffering. He must occupy his mind with their present and future punishment. The Law must triumph. There must be no mercy.
This is the chief mark of the theology of hell, for in hell there is everything but mercy. That is why God himself is absent from hell. Mercy is the manifestation of his presence.
The theology of the devil is for those who, for one reason or another, whether because they are perfect, or because they have come to an agreement with the Law, no longer need any mercy. With them (O grim joy!) God is “satisfied.” So too is the devil. It is quite an achievement, to please everybody!
The people who listen to this sort of thing, and absorb it, and enjoy it, develop a notion of the spiritual life which is a kind of hypnosis of evil. The concepts of sin, suffering, damnation, punishment, the justice of God, retribution, the end of the world and so on, are things over which they smack their lips with unspeakable pleasure. Perhaps this is because they derive a deep, subconscious comfort from the though that many other people will fall into the hell which they themselves are going to escape. And how do they know they are going to escape it? They cannot give any definite reason except for the fact that they feel a certain sense of relief at the thought that all this punishment is prepared for practically everyone but themselves.
This feeling of complacency is what they refer to as “faith,” and it constitutes a kind of conviction that they are “saved.”

The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them of the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which “God is satisfied.” And after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men.

The moral theology of the devil starts out with the principle: “Pleasure is sin.” Then he goes to work it the other way: “All sin is pleasure.”
After that he points out that pleasure is practically unavoidable and that we have a natural tendency to do things that please us, from which he reasons that all our natural tendencies are evil and that our nature is evil in itself. And he leads us to the conclusion that no one can possibly avoid sin, since pleasure is inescapable.
After that, to make sure that no one will try to escape or avoid sin, he adds that what is unavoidable cannot be a sin. Then the whole concept of sin is thrown out the window as irrelevant, and people decide that there is nothing left except to live for pleasure, and in that way pleasures that are naturally good become evil by deordination and lives are thrown away in unhappiness and sin.

It sometimes happens that men who preach most vehemently about evil and the punishment of evil, so that they seem to have practically nothing else on their minds except sin, are really unconscious haters of other men. They think the world does not appreciate them, and this is their way of getting even.
The devil is not afraid to preach the will of God provided he can preach it in his own way.
The argument goes something like this: “God wills you to do what is right. But you have an interior attraction which tells you, by a nice warm glow of satisfaction, what is right. Therefore, if others try to interfere and make you do something that does not produce this comfortable sense of interior satisfaction, quote Scripture, tell them that you ought to obey God rather than men, and then go ahead and do your own will, do the thing that gives you that nice, warm glow.”

The theology of the devil is really not theology but magic. “Faith” in this theology is really not the acceptance of a God Who reveals Himself as mercy. It is a psychological, subjective “force” which applies a kind of violence to reality in order to change it according to one's own whims. Faith is a kind of supereffective wishing: a mastery that comes from a special, mysteriously dynamic will power that is generated by “profound convictions.” By virtue of this wonderful energy one can exert a persuasive force even on God Himself and bend His will to one's own will. By this astounding new dynamic soul force of faith (which any quack can develop in you for an appropriate remuneration) you can turn God into a means to your own ends. We become civilized medicine men, and God becomes our servant. Though He is terrible in His own right, He respects our sorcery, He allows Himself to be tamed by it. He will appreciate our dynamism, and will reward it with success in everything we attempt. We will become popular because we have “faith.” We will be rich because we have “faith.” All our national enemies will come and lay down their arms at our feet because we have “faith.” Business will boom all over the world, and we will be able to make money out of everything and everyone under the sun because of the charmed life we lead. We have faith.
But there is a subtle dialectic in all this, too.
We hear that faith does everything. So we close our eyes and strain a bit, to generate some “soul force.” We believe. We believe.
Nothing happens.
We close our eyes again, and generate some more soul force. The devil likes us to generate soul force. He helps us to generate plenty of it. We are just gushing with soul force.
But nothing happens.
So we go on with this until we become disgusted with the whole business. We get tired of “generating soul force.” We get tired of this “faith” that does not do anything to change reality. It does not take away our anxieties, our conflicts, it leaves us a prey to uncertainty. It does not lift all responsibilities off our shoulders. Its magic is not so effective after all. It does not thoroughly convince us that God is satisfied with us, or even that we are satisfied with ourselves (though in this, it is true, some people's faith is quite effective).
Having become disgusted with faith, and therefore with God, we are now ready for the Totalitarian Mass Movement that will pick us up on the rebound and make us happy with war, with the persecution of “inferior races” or of enemy classes, or generally speaking, with actively punishing someone who is different from ourselves.

Another characteristic of the devil's moral theology is the exaggeration off all distinctions between this and that, good and evil, right and wrong. These distinctions become irreducible divisions. No longer is there any sense that we might perhaps all be more or less at fault, and that we might be expected to take upon our own shoulders the wrongs of others by forgiveness, acceptance, patient understanding and love, and thus help one another to find the truth. On the contrary, in the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong. This does not exactly make for peace and unity among men, because it means that everyone wants to be absolutely right himself or to attach himself to another who is absolutely right. And in order to prove their rightness they have to punish and eliminate those who are wrong. Those who are wrong, in turn, convinced that they are right … etc.
Finally, as might be expected, the moral theology of the devil grants an altogether unusual amount of importance to … the devil. Indeed one soon comes to find out that he is the very center of the whole system. That he is behind everything. That he is moving everybody in the world except ourselves. That he is out to get even with us. And that there is every chance of his doing so because, it now appears, his power is equal to that of God, or even perhaps superior to it …
In one word, the theology of the devil is purely and simply that the devil is god.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Olafur Eliasson and I would like to draw your attention to this movie opening in New York this Friday. More posts on it soon but from what I can see it looks like it will be amazing. So if you're in the area maybe see it?

Perhaps the most influential critique of the “natural” in the late twentieth century is Derrida's discussion of Rousseau in Of Grammatology. In the early twenty-first century, a contender has to be Timothy Morton's Ecology without Nature...

It's interesting because there's a whole discussion of (specifically) Of Grammatology in Dark Ecology. You are going to be so amazed and weirded out by the cover...

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Camping. Oh it is so so good! I did three months solid in the Rockies a while ago and when I got back down to Boulder the inevitable happened. I noticed how everything was covered in concrete. In a not cool way.

Very not cool. Deep ecology is where my heart is for sure. I used to say I was a depthless ecologist. That word could have two interestingly opposite meanings.

Monday, October 12, 2015

My friends Alan and Tim, ranking superb Shelley scholars of the world, are about to publish another book, The Neglected Shelley, and it has an essay by me in it on Spinoza and Shelley....so so nice to revisit my PhD topic.

Sunday, October 11, 2015

It's an agricultural program that has been running without much change--only upgrades to more intense versions of itself--since about 10 000BC, when it began at the start of the (warmer) Holocene.

The basic elements of the program are: settle down (stop hunter gathering), farm grains.

There is an implicit logic to this program. Sometimes it's directly stated, sometimes it emerges from how the program executes:

1. The law of noncontradiction is inviolable.
2. To exist is to be constantly present.
3. More existing is better than any quality of existing.

When left to run for 12 000 years, agrilogistics successfully illustrates the flaws in this logic: it generates the global warming that it was designed to avoid, causing mass extinction.

A survival paradox emerges: the attempt to survive at any cost no matter what the appearances are (how the logical axioms pan out) is precisely the dynamic of murder-suicide. Agrilogistical machination is an example of what Freud calls death drive.

Exhibit A: in the New York Times. We've successfully bred the bitter taste out of grains, with the result that they are supremely unhealthy. The breeding of the biggest, juiciest, sweetest grains has eliminated biodiversity and has resulted in a more-than-ironic unintended consequence. Thanks Cliff (again!).

We know from food science that newborn babies make the “bitter” wincing face when they taste something bitter.

“Bitter” is a warning light: this substance could be poisonous in sufficient quantities. Think of how hard wired that is. Cyanide, which is required for life to evolve, tastes bitter in its common form (just try an almond or an apple pip).

Bitter is the taste of tannins. In small quantities, tannins are very helpful at diminishing cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and diabetes.

The attempt to avoid death results in death: precisely, the death drive, a maniacal urge to live (to diminish stimulation) that ends up being self-destructive.

It's like: you eat McDonalds to avoid the taste of bitter or sour. Then you die more quickly.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Olafur, it was a real pleasure doing this. Sometimes one can open one's big mouth and nice things come out. This was one of those times.

Actually I'm going to go out on a limb and say, thanks to the kindness of Olafur and his team (hi everyone!) and the Moderna Museet (hi Daniel! Karin! Matilda! and everyone!) and say, it was an exquisite pleasure doing this.

My friend Alan, who used to be party of Andy Warhol's crew, and is now an awesome, awesome Buddhist and DJ and dancer and best buddy of your truly, has been waiting patiently since 1990 for me to go all hardcore with the techno.

“Welcome to End of Life Care Center UK. We'll help you feel nice and cozy while you die. Please deposit your £100 in the Charon Box at the front of the jetway. We've decided that instead of trying to rip you off sneakily, thinking that you, the ignorant American, have no idea what's going on, you should just open your pockets as you exit the plane. All taxis and trains have been fitted with trembling lace curtains for your morbid convenience.”

I just figured out, for the second time in my life, but this time using Word instead of paper and pencil, how to solve simultaneous equations. It was like riding a bike after not having ridden for a while. Then the following thought sequence occurred.

All the math you learn in school isn't math. It's computation.

All STEM subjects boil down to computation.

So humans are now being told that learning to compute is the most important (the stem). (Care to analyze that ideologically, someone?)

But computers (the clue is in the name) can compute at least trillions of times faster than humans. (Care to analyze the weirdness of being told you need to ape a computer, only trillions of times slower.)

So learning this way is worse than useless, because what we have learned is that computation isn't the same as math (e.g. set theory, number theory...). And computers do this already. (Thanks to 150 years of computational machination.)

So STEM subjects are worse than useless. (NB not the actual disciplines, but the subjects as conceptualized by the government. Chemistry is awesome.)

So STEM is not the stem.

What is number? What is math? At some point, you're going to have to ask a philosopher.

The core, or stem indeed, is in the humanities.

I propose an alternative model: core learning, and things you can do with things you've learned. The latter is computation. It is secondary to the core. NB "core" is not an acronym (hooray).

To compute, you need something to compute. You can't get this from computation. You get this from the core.

Add to this, of course, the fact that science (when it's not just computation a la engineering or math-as-computer-aping) is about appearance: data.

While the humanities are about reality: the ungraspable nature of things.

We do reality. They do appearance. If the STEM/non-STEM distinction is a reality/appearance distinction (of course it is), it's totally upside down.

But you don't need this second set of moves. You just need the first. STEM isn't the stem.

Daniel Birnbaum, the excellent curator of the Moderna Museet, and excellent Husserlian, told me a very interesting story. There is a relationship between Arne Naess, founder of deep ecology, and Diana Ross, via a relation of his also called Arne Naess....!

So I figure that's what I am: I'm a Diana Ross Deep Ecologist. Disco Deep Ecology.

Beyond Sexism, Racism, Speciesism, We Are All the Same

I Wrote a Book with Björk

“A magical booklet of emails between Björk and philosopher Timothy Morton is a wild, wonderful conversation full of epiphanies and sympathies, incorporating Michael Jackson, daft goths and the vibration of subatomic particles in its dizzying leaps, alive with the thrill of falling in love with someone’s brain.” (Emily Mackay, NME)

New

AND

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. He is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Email me

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Zermelo-Fraenkel Free Zone

“Outstanding.”—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”—Vince Carducci